I’ve spent years dealing with Window’s roaming profiles, a feature that allows users on a Microsoft NT 4 or Active Directory domain to have their settings and files follow them from computer to computer. A good portion of my teachers roam in that fashion, necessitating roaming profiles (they make backing things up easy too). Over the years I like to think that I’ve tuned them as best I can, yet they remain slow, cumbersome, and easily corrupted. I redirected the Application Data folder, which speeds logon times, yet puts a pretty heavy strain on the network and file server. I don’t cache roaming profiles, as caching can often bloat or corrupt profiles, yet it lengthens the logon time (seemingly undoing the advantages of folder redirection). I excluded the Recent folder, which also speeds logon times, yet causes teachers to complain about not being to find their “documents” (sigh). I had resigned myself to just living with them, as had my teachers. However, I think I may have found a light at the end of the tunnel.
In doing research on setting up profiles for my new terminal server (yeah baby!), I found a nice little freeware product called the Flex Profile Kit (FPK). It’s a compilation of scripts and the Office 2003 profile wizard which allows you to use mandatory profiles yet still retain custom settings and files. Mandatory profiles are an admin’s dream, but a user’s nightmare. They load fast and are incorruptable, yet they don’t retain user settings. The FPK gets around this conundrum by exporting registry keys (and optionally files) to an OPS file during the logoff process. During login, once the mandatory profile is loaded, the OPS file is loaded back into the profile by way of a login script. What to save and reload are defined by way of simple INI files, and there’s even a GUI to help automate the configuration and creation of the INI files. Deployment is handled by an MSI file, easily pushed out via group policy or Altiris. All of this is free of charge and well documented. Frankly, I’m amazed.
While the FPK was designed to solve profile problems in terminal server or Citrix environments, it’s perfectly usable in a traditional client/server environment like ours. If it works even remotely the way it seems to, I think I may have finally found the way out of my profile hell.